A brand’s voice is no longer held by a single writer; it’s held by hundreds, sometimes thousands of people — and that’s not the brand’s loss. It’s the test itself.
Disney’s deal with TikTok in early August is the clearest case of it: scenes from Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar are now being retold not by the studio itself but by thousands of creators who have never met each other. A company that guarded its copyright with an iron fist for decades handed its own characters to strangers. Reading this as “giving up control” is the wrong frame; the real question was never whether control was given up, but what holds the brand together once it is.
Signal and Noise
The distinction Claude Shannon brought to communication theory sixty years ago does the work here: every channel carries noise, but the signal — the coded, fixed, repeating pattern — stays readable through it. A thousand creators tell it in a thousand different styles; their sense of humour, editing pace, tone of voice never line up. That’s noise, and it can’t be suppressed, nor is it worth trying to. The brand’s job isn’t to silence the noise; it’s to name the handful of constants that still read the same no matter the noise around them — a colour, a musical motif, a line delivered a certain way, a visual signature. The fewer of these there are, the better they work — because a small number of rules survives intact even in a thousand different interpreters’ hands.
There used to be one way to protect this signal: narrow the channel. One agency, one director, one approval desk — noise stayed low because there were few voices to begin with. That option no longer exists; channel count stopped being the organisation’s choice and became the natural scale of platforms and creators. A brand still trying to erase noise from the channel is playing by the rules of a world that doesn’t exist anymore.
Too Many Rules Drown the Signal
Most brands do the opposite: they try to force every creator into the same mould with a hundred-page guideline. The result is neither consistency nor authenticity — either a stifled style that follows every rule, or uncontrolled chaos that ignores them. A small number of hard constants works harder than a large number of loose rules, because a constant is remembered and a rule is forgotten. The only thing to ask of a creator is never to break those few constants — the rest is their own voice, and that voice carries an intimacy the brand could never manufacture on its own.
This doesn’t mean giving up quality control; it means changing what quality measures. The old question was “did this content match the brand guideline?” — a yes-or-no that could halt production either way. The new question is “did this content carry the few constants?” — usually yes, because there are few of them and a breach is easy to spot. Oversight narrows; scope widens.
The New Job: Naming the Constants
So the brand’s central team’s job is changing — from producing content to deciding the handful of points production must never bend on. That’s the hard part: deciding which element is signal and which is noise is a finer craft than producing ever was. Choose too many constants and you smother the creator, who won’t show up; choose too few and the brand dissolves, unrecognisable. The right number is usually smaller than it feels — three, four elements; more than that is already a rulebook, fewer is already chaos.
Even Disney pulling creator videos back into its own Verts stream is a version of this: set distribution free, keep the constant under your own roof.
The voice multiplies. The signature doesn’t.